Monthly Archives: September 2018

Did you really refer to Rachel Mitchell, the lawyer hired by Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee – a woman with 30 years of experience as a prosecutor whom they hired so they could hide behind her skirts and not have to interrogate Dr. Christine Blasey Ford themselves – as a “female assistant”?

But wait: she said there was a witness – someone else who was there when it happened.

And others have reported similar experiences with him.

Oh well, the Senate Judiciary Committee decided, no need to talk to that witness under oath or investigate the other allegations. We believe him, she’s a liar, the others don’t matter, and that’s that.

And with that, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve and send his nomination to the full Senate. Senate Republican leaders, facing a possible mutiny among their own members, decided to slow down the process, but they did so in spite of the Judiciary Committee and not because of it. The committee wanted to move full steam ahead.

Isn’t it ironic that the Senate Judiciary Committee seems to understand so little – and care even less – about justice?

You remember Ben Carson: the narcoleptic-seeming brain surgeon who ran briefly for the Republican presidential nomination and appeared utterly clueless about the kinds of issues that presidential candidates need to be at least somewhat knowledgeable about.

(Not that being clueless about the issues prevented Donald Trump from being elected president. Thanks, America.)

Anyhow, for playing nice during the campaign and also for being African-American, Dr. Carson received a lovely parting gift: he was appointed Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He knows nothing about public housing (except for growing up in it), nothing about economic development, and has never run a large organization, but his credentials at least rivaled those of Betsy DeVos’s for education secretary and the job was his.

Except for the purchase of $31,000 worth of dining room furniture to fill his office’s conference room – a purchase for which Carson was pretty quick to blame his wife – Ben has generally kept a pretty low profile.

Until last week.

That’s when Carson decided to weigh in on, of all things, the new obstacles to the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh (fun fact: a law school classmate of Mrs. Curmudgeon).

CNBC takes up the story:

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson told an audience of conservative activists on Friday that the sexual assault allegations facing President Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court are part of a plot by socialists to take over America that dates back more than a century.

Take a moment to let that sink in.

Okay, now we can continue.

This guy doesn’t look so dangerous, does he?

“If you really understand the big picture of what’s going on, then what’s going on with Kavanaugh will make perfectly good sense to you,” Carson said at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington. “There’ve been people in this country for a very long time, going all the way back to the Fabians, people who’ve wanted to fundamentally change this country.”

And there’s more.

Now, Carson continued, these forces “are like wet hornets, just completely lost control off the deep end, and the further they get away from being able to control the courts the more desperate they become,” he said. “They don’t see themselves as being able to control the courts for another generation, so what is left? Chaos and destruction.”

Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Ben Carson: member of the cabinet of the president of the United States.

Did you really go on Fox & Friends on Tuesday and tell the folks there that

The president wants this process to come to a vote because that’s what’s supposed to happen. In every single one of these instances where someone is nominated, they go before, they have a hearing and then the senators vote on it.

Um, Sarah, have you wiped from your memory the name “Merrick Garland”? Mr. Garland, you may recall, was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Obama in March of 2016 and the Republican-controlled Senate refused even to consider his nomination. Judge Garland did not go before the Senate Judiciary Committee, was not the subject of a vote by the entire Senate, and in fact, some of the members of the Judiciary Committee wouldn’t even let him in their office.

So when you tell us that “In every single one of these instances where someone is nominated, they go before, they have a hearing and then the senators vote on it” you either are having a complete memory lapse, are lying through your teeth, or are hopelessly, totally clueless.

Michael Cohen, whose net worth is generally placed as high as $20 million, has launched a “GoFundMe” account to help pay his lawyer bills. Roger Stone, political dirty tricks expert extraordinaire going all the way back to the days of Richard Nixon, has declared that he expects to be indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller and is making a similar pitch for financial support for his legal costs. Stone is reportedly worth about $10 million.

Example #2

Congressman Duncan Hunter, indicted for using campaign contributions for personal and family purposes in violation of federal campaign finance laws, is using campaign funds to pay for his defense against charges that he broke the law by using campaign funds for personal purposes.

Last week the Houston Texans of the National Football League lost to the Tennessee Titans by a score of 20-17. The Houston team was trying to score when time ran out and the game ended. The Houston Chronicle published a story about the game and its ending and, as is often the case, readers posted their own comments after the story in the newspaper’s online edition. One of those comments read:

That may have been the most inept quarterback decision I’ve seen in the NFL.When you need precision decision making you can’t count on a black quarterback.

The quarterback of the Houston team, Deshaun Watson, is black.

That’s pretty bad, right?

But…

The second:

The person who wrote that comment? It was the superintendent of the Onalaska Independent School District, which is about 75 miles from Houston.

So, which is worst? The comment or the source? Or does it even matter?

Not to suggest that The Curmudgeon is a little too fussy and demanding when it comes to the written word but…

Last week was the very uncurmudgeonly Mrs. Curmudgeon’s birthday and her husband purchased a card with what he thought was the best, most appropriate, most romantic and heartfelt message he could find.

Last week the actor Matthew Perry tweeted for the first time in five months, declaring

Three months in a hospital bed. Check

That’s pretty bad news if you’re a Matthew Perry fan, which The Curmudgeon is, although he thinks it’s pretty bad news even for people of whom you’re not a fan.

Inquiring reporters immediately began querying the people who are responsible for Perry’s publicity, seeking to learn more about what’s wrong with the former Chandler Bing.

Then, as reported by People magazine – apologies for the weak source but this isn’t exactly the kind of issue to which the Wall Street Journal assigns a team of reporters – we learned that

In August, it was first revealed that the actor was on the mend after undergoing surgery. “Matthew Perry recently underwent surgery in a Los Angeles hospital to repair a gastrointestinal perforation,” a rep for the actor said in a statement to PEOPLE.

“He is grateful for the concern and asks for continued privacy as he heals,” the statement concluded.

Sorry, Matthew Perry and his people: you can’t have it both ways. You can’t interrupt your five-month radio silence with such major news and then demand that your privacy be respected. If you’re all that interested in your privacy you don’t tweet about the hospital stay and if you do, you share more than the very little bit of information you grudgingly offered.

But that’s show biz: they do everything they can think of to get into and stay in the public eye but when they get into it for something they don’t really want to talk about – even when they raised the subject themselves – they suddenly go all dignified and ask for respect for their privacy.

The Curmudgeon says nuts to that. As he wrote, he considers himself a Matthew Perry fan but Perry opened this door and he has no inherent right to close it in the manner he has.